Tremanty was in his ear. “Where’d it go? Where’d it go?”
“I’m going down to the bridge,” Lucas shouted into the phone.
He left the Porsche on the bridge, ran around the end of it anddown a slanting retaining wall into the channel and toward the second bridge as another car came in from the left and two FBI agents jumped out and looked down at him. Lucas shouted, “He went under the bridge.”
Tremanty, in his ear: “That’s not a bridge, there’s no bridge there. Where’d he go?”
Lucas ran toward the camp and around a tent there made of a blue plastic tarp... and found himself looking into a tunnel.
An emaciated bearded man said, “Hey, man...”
“Where’d he go?” Lucas shouted. “Where’d the bike go?”
“What’d he do, man?” the thin man asked.
“Where’d the fuck he go?” Lucas shouted again, grabbing the man by his shirt and pulling him up on his tiptoes.
The man pointed a finger and said, “You can see those tracks? Almost ran over my ass.”
—
LUCAS LET HIM GOand ran in the direction he’d pointed, found the motorcycle tracks where they disappeared into the tunnel. There were sparks of light in the darkness, and Lucas turned to one of the FBI agents who was coming up behind and shouted, “Get on the radio and tell them where he went and which tunnel it is. See if they can figure where it comes out. You don’t have a flashlight, do you?”
“In the car.”
“Get it and throw it down to me. I’m heading into the tunnel.”
The agent broke away, and Lucas stepped into the darkness, which wasn’t quite absolute. As his eyes adjusted, he could see there were more people inside, spots of illumination fromflashlights and from kerosene lanterns—old-timey glass-and-metal vessels that put out a golden glow stronger than many of the other sources.
Behind him, the agent ran down the sloping embankment and shouted, “I’m coming with you.”
He handed Lucas the flashlight from his car and had one of his own. The two of them ran into the tunnel, following the track of the motorbike.
The tunnel was dotted with lights and each one signified another camp. The floor of the tunnel was covered with sand, ankle-deep in spots, with the freestanding tents/tarps fastened to the walls. There was crap all over the place: food wrappers, McDonald’s cartons, old discarded blankets clogged with damp sand. The series of lights ended with a single kerosene lantern a hundred yards in and the heavyset woman who sat next to it with two shopping carts draped with a blue plastic tarp as a tent.
“You cops?”
Lucas grunted as he went by.
And she called out after him, “I think he shot somebody. I heard a shot. I think.”
—
LUCAS AND THEAGENTcontinued running down the tunnel; it had smelled bad from the beginning, but the stink got heavier as they ran. The agent pulled the tail of his jacket up over his mouth and nose, and called, “I think this is their toilet,” and Lucas nodded and pulled his shirt up over his nose. He took it down once, to see if he could talk to Tremanty on the handset, but the handset was dead.
Lucas had lost track of time, but thought they must have been running for five or six minutes, when they saw a light ahead. They ran on for another minute, to the end of the tunnel, where seven-foot-tall grates blocked it top to bottom. One side of the grate had been pried open far enough for a man to squeeze through.
A body lay by the grate, a man’s, with a bullet hole in the head. And beside the body, the green motorcycle and the money bag, empty except for the GPS tracker. The bike had no license plate.
The agent, who looked like a teenager, said, “Murdered somebody,” and then he gagged from the smell of the tunnel. And maybe the sight of the body.
Lucas said, “Nothing we can do now. We gotta go up.”
They went up and found themselves standing under an enormous ultra-modern Ferris wheel. To the left, they saw a parking garage for the LINQ, a casino.
The agent said, “Jesus, we’re right on the Strip.”
Lucas lifted the handset and called Tremanty. “You there?”
